Best of the Blog, 2024

Posted on by stufffromthestuff

2024 was an absolute banner year for the blog in terms of readership growth, showing an over 170% increase in page views from 2023. Thanks to all of you who contributed to this remarkable growth! As I like to do every year, I thought I’d take some time at year’s end to look at the most popular posts from the past year, along with a few posts that mean a lot to me but which didn’t get as much traction. (For further ‘best of’, see my Best of the Blog, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023, along with my end of 2020 post reflecting on the blog’s first three years.)

2024 Overview

2024 began with the series Who Do We Trust?, which explored the complex question of Christian authority. This was followed directly with my series of daily Lenten reflections on the Desert Fathers. The Easter season was then spent on a series looking at the development of ideas about the Holy Spirit throughout the Scriptures and later Christian traditions. I then turned to a more introspective series, A Renewed Generous Orthodoxy, which looked at how I’ve personally been impacted by various traditions, movements, and denominations. During the Summer, my focus was on a full study of Genesis 1-11 using my Integral Hermeneutic method (similar to what I did for Ephesians in 2022)). After this pretty intensive study, I eased up in September, and revisited the intersections of spirituality and literature in part two of the series Wisdom IN Literature. Finally, much of the Fall was spent reflecting on the Sermon on the Mount — something I found particularly beneficial in a trying time.

10 Most Popular Posts from 2024

Once again this year, the most popular posts of the year were all from the back catalog. But before getting into those, here are the most popular new posts from 2024:

  1. The Spirit in the Second Temple Period
  2. The Holy Spirit in Church History, part 1: Patristic Thought
  3. The Impossibility of Perfection: Abba Poemen 88
  4. Becoming Fire: A Reflection on Abba Joseph of Panephysis 7
  5. Change We Can Trust: A Reflection on Psalm 146
  6. A Lesson on Balance: A Reflection on Abba Eulogius 1
  7. The Holy Spirit in Church History, Part 2: Medieval Thought
  8. Humanity in God’s Image and Likeness: Genesis 1.26-31, Part 1
  9. Why I am … Integral: Final Thoughts on a Renewed Generous Orthodoxy
  10. Who Is Wise? A Reflection on James 3.13-4.3, 7-8a

10 Most Popular Posts Published before 2024

In terms of older posts, for the first time ever, my post on Buddhist nun Pema Chodron’s practice of ‘Feel the Feeling and Drop the Story’ was dethroned as the most viewed, though it still easily cracked the top 10. I was gratified to see some of the big traffic on some of these, as many of them are posts that mean a lot to me:

  1. Two Sides of Adam: Gender in Genesis 1-3
  2. How’s Your Heart? A Reflection on Mark 10.2-16
  3. Vine and Branches: A Reflection on John 15.1-8
  4. Songs of Lamentation and Longing: Hearing Black Spirituals
  5. The Night That Was My Guide: The Dark Night of St. John of the Cross
  6. Feel the Feeling and Drop the Story
  7. Understanding Biblical Genres: Apocalyptic
  8. ‘Queer Coded’ Friendships: On David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi
  9. Imitated, Never Duplicated: A Reflection on Philippians 3.17-4.1
  10. The Call to Christian Responsibility: Bonhoeffer vs. the Third Reich

My Favorite 2024 Posts that didn’t make the ‘top 10’

Even if a lot of my favourite older posts did get traction in 2024, it’s always the case that the posts that mean the most to me don’t get the most traffic when they’re first published. Here are some of the posts not mentioned above that were particularly close to my heart in 2024:

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